A trip to the Don River, part 2

We spent most of our time in the town of Novocherkassk, the former capital of the Don Cossacks, about twenty miles northeast of Rostov-on-Don. Mila and I got to do a lot of walking around the great Eurasian steppe in the few days we were there. The home where we stayed was on the outskirts of the town on the main road to Rostov, called Baklonovsky Prospekt. It is the kind of space that in America would be littered with fast food joints and other strip mall stuff. Here, there were just a few gas stations. We rumbled in the stroller along the broken pavement past the bus station, a boarded up restaurant, a large mound of earth with stone steps leading up to the top of it. We were told later this is a Scythian burial mound, or some such. Either way, pretty rotten view from the top. Then on past an institute for research into viniculture and enology.

Then you reach a little square, featuring a stadium on one side, and a memorial to cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on the other, as Novocherkassk is where cosmonaut training equipment was manufactured.

From there, the prospekt a pleasant boulevard, with a recently paved walkway along the middle. After another half an hour of walking you get close to the center of the city.

One time we got far enough to turn onto Pushkinskaya Ulitsa. The side streets are very pleasant, lots of trees and old, single-story wooden buildings, many brightly painted. It is very quiet and peaceful. Eventually we found ourselves on the main street, Moskovskaya Ulitsa. For a city of about 100,000 people, it was busy in an unforced way. Provincial Russia remains left behind in tough economic times while Moscow and St. Petersburg continue to advance. Yet here was a city center that is thriving – people walking about, businesses open, no empty storefronts. And it is very amusing to think about the extraordinary efforts every small town in America has to go to to “revive their downtown/waterfront/whatever.” If only Americans hadn’t spent the last half of the twentieth century building and planning for cars instead of people everything would be fine. What if we hadn’t been obsessed about building housing on single lots miles away from the center, spending fortunes on highways and parking lots instead of on walkways, bikepaths, and streetcars? There are very specific and enduring reasons people live in communities, and every dead American downtown is a testament to what happens when you forget it.

On our last day we went into the center of Rostov-on-Don, and went down to the embankment, where the Don flows not quite so quietly, as huge ships make their way upriver from the Black Sea to the Volga. We walked up very steep Soborny Pereulok toward the market and the cathedral, and walked around the narrow streets in the center. The city is a major provincial center, but unlike Moscow and St. Pete, it still hasn't quite found its way. The buildings are at once dignified and old, but crumbling badly.

You get a warped sense of things when you live in the center of a nation, especially if the city happens to be as warped as Moscow. It is strange how one city can dominate the political, economic, and cultural life of a nation so completely the way the big capitals of Europe do. In New York, you feel like you are on the lunatic fringe of America, in Washington, like you on some weird island where the rest of the country sends their emissaries to argue about things. This is the reason why I like Philadelphia so much – it was an actual place, with its own customs, idioms, and not just a jumble of characteristics imported from somewhere else.

Moscow is home to about one in 14 Russians, which is amazingly disproportionate considering that the country itself occupies a sixth of the planet. It is a nice place to get away from, especially as it becomes more like Calcutta or Lagos and less like New York or London everyday. It is a relief to get away from all the elitny bullshit for awhile. Only once in the whole week we were away did I see some jerk’s gleaming Mercedes parked on the damn sidewalk outside a restaurant with mirrored windows and uniformed security guards – and that was on a relatively tony part of the Don River embankment in Rostov.

Baklonovsky Boulevard...

Some shots of the center of Novocherkassk...

A stained glass window of a heroic Red Cossack at the Don Cossack Museum. As Olga noted, no word of the Whites they were fighting against, those mysterious strangers from parts unknown....